Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati
Adventures into the errant familiar
Edited and translated by Patrick Barron
Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian essayist Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge, to street theatre, writing, photography, cinema and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical and artistic movements of the last 50 years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural and biographical context, serving to illuminate his books available in English, namely Towards the River’s Mouth, Adventures in Africa, Voices from the Plains and Appearances.
There are various paths to take, tempting readers to wander and become lost in webs of daring thought, drawn ever on by Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary and his sodality with others. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of Celati’s writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. Herein is a taste of a seemingly endless series of adventures of the mind and body, always tapped into a lithe sensitivity for an encompassing collective imagination not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but very much also engaged with the everyday lives, places and tales we all constantly share.
Praise for Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati
‘Barron’s volume is a very welcome addition to the field. As the first collection of Gianni Celati’s essays in English translation, the book makes accessible a wide selection of his critical work to an Anglophone audience.’ Marina Spunta, University of Leicester
Patrick Barron is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 ‘One-Page Autobiography’
2 ‘Speech as Spectacle’
3 ‘Gianni Celati and Italo Calvino, Correspondence (Comiche)’
‘Surface Stories’
4 ‘The Virtues of the Gorilla’
5 ‘The Archaeological Bazaar’
6 ‘The Comic Body in Space’
7 ‘Counter-information on Power. On Foucault’s Discipline and Punish’
8 ‘On the Era of this Book’ and ‘Alice and the Occurrence…’ from Displaced Alice: Collective Materials (on Alice) for a Survival Manual
9 ‘Soft Objects’
10 ‘Adventure at the End of the Twentieth Century’
11 ‘Fictions to Believe in, An Example’
12 ‘A System of Stories about the External World’
13 ‘Desert Crossings’
14 ‘Translating Jack London’
15 ‘The Frontal View: Antonioni, L’Avventura and Waiting’
16 ‘Comments on a Natural Theatre of Images’
17 ‘Swift, Prophetic Treatise on the Modern Age’
18 ‘The Sentiment of Space’ 19 ‘Introductory Note’, Narrators of the reserves
20 ‘Threshold for Luigi Ghirri: How to Think in Images’
21 ‘In Praise of the Tale’
22 ‘Last Contemplators’
23 ‘Italo’s Death’
24 ‘Two Years of Study at the British Museum’
25 ‘Rewriting, Retelling, Translating’
26 ‘Heading to the River’s Mouth’
27 From ‘In Zurich with Joyce’
28 ‘On Jonathan Swift and the Development of Aliens’
29 ‘The Disorder of Words: On a Translation of Joyce’s Ulysses’
Bibliography of Original Source Texts
Selected Bibliography
Index
'Barron’s volume is a very welcome addition to the field. As the first collection of Gianni Celati’s essays in English translation, the book makes accessible a wide selection of his critical work to an Anglophone audience.’
Marina Spunta, University of Leicester
Format: Hardback
Size: 234 × 156 mm
284 Pages
10 B&W photo/halftones
Copyright: © 2024
ISBN: 9781800086418
Publication: March 01, 2024
Series: Literature and Translation
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